


Settling

by Miss_Ash



Series: Landing [2]
Category: Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears (2020), Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: ALL THE SPOILERS, F/M, Movie AU, and also spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:46:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23386846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Ash/pseuds/Miss_Ash
Summary: Coming back from the dead, as it happens, is not half as fun as she’d once thought it might be.An AU continuation of the movie after my fic 'Landing'.
Relationships: Phryne Fisher/Jack Robinson
Series: Landing [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1681327
Comments: 45
Kudos: 185





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I decided I really want Landing to stand on its own as inside of canon, which is why I'm now posting the AU part as its own story. Now, I tried - I swear I tried - to get this all resolved in one chapter, but turns out trying to resolve a feature-length relationship arc in literally the next scene is... a lot. So I've split it into two, mainly just for ease of reading. I promise the happy ending is still coming it's just... mildly delayed.
> 
> Also sometimes (mostly) the curtains are just blue, I know this, and preach it often, but I just... really hate that dress - so today they're not.

Coming back from the dead, as it happens, is not half as fun as she’d once thought it might be. 

Yes, there’s champagne – and hugs and kisses aplenty – but none of the joy is where she finds she wants it. None of the elation at her continued existence is from who she wants to see it from most. 

Jack, she thinks, is acting like he’d far rather she had stayed dead, and it hurts a lot more than she can fully articulate, even to herself. 

She knows she could have handled the discussion on the lawn far better, she knows she’d let her own shock and anger and heartbreak cloud any kind of reason as they’d squared each other down – but she also feels somewhat justified in it. 

After all, he hadn’t come. 

He hadn’t come and he’d had no reason to be so damn righteous about this whole her being dead nonsense. It wasn’t even her _fault_. If she’d known… if she’d had even the faintest notion that he’d spent all that time mourning her then of course she would have done something about it. Of course she wouldn’t have willingly let people she loves think her _dead_. It had been a job evading the authorities, though – uninterested as she was in imprisonment – and as soon as it had been safe to, she’d flown straight back. 

She hadn’t exactly stopped for small talk along the way. 

Jack’s pain, she understands, but his anger only infuriates her. She refuses to apologise for a pain she’d never had any intention to cause. She refuses to apologise for a misconception she had no part in perpetuating. She refuses to allow him to put his fears on her – certainly not when he’s the one who’d given up on her in the first place. 

She stands staring after the space where he’d departed for several long minutes, still, thoughts twisting around her mind like an aurora – each emotion a beam of light, impossible to quite discern into shape. 

When she finally has her breath back and has pulled herself together enough to move again, she sneaks away upstairs with the excuse of changing out of her flight clothes. Phryne finds when she gets there, though, that she can realise no enthusiasm in herself for the sartorial. 

Her mind is firmly on Jack, on how she feels about him being here, how she feels about him walking away. How angry she is, how upset she is, how much this has ruined the splendid mood she had been in at the thought of returning to England. 

In the end she just grabs a dress and puts it on – but when she looks at herself she finds it too bright and ostentatious and not at all reflective of how she’s feeling so she tugs it off again with a huff of frustration. 

Phryne scans the rows of clothes in her wardrobe and then spies something with a victorious smirk. He wants to act like she’s dead? Fine. She’ll dress in black for the occasion – just not completely. No, this black has mischievous splashes of colour, refusing to mourn in totality, inserts of brightness in the dark – and she decides that it’s a statement she feels strongly like making regardless of whether he’s here to see it or not. 

When she gets downstairs, she makes a point of hanging off Jonathan just to make herself feel better – but he’s not altogether playing, and it can’t help but make her wonder. She wonders how long Jack has been here, wonders what he has said to them. More to the point she wonders what they have said to _him_ – since it’s the Lofthouses, in all their hospitality, who had wound up housing her after she’d escaped her parents and started nursing the heartache of his not following. 

It’s more than her pride might be able to stand if Jonathan has spoken in any kind of confidence to Jack. Some things, a man’s ego never needs, however uninflated it might be beforehand. 

The fencing is a welcome distraction, as is more talk of the strange case of Shirin’s tribe. The job’s not done there, she reminds herself, and it would do to stop brooding over Jack and focus back on the case at hand. 

The moment she leaves Shirin’s room, however, she can’t help thinking that a midnight meeting with a stranger would just be so much more _fun_ if Jack were there. She’d done pretty well having fun without him – and will go on doing so – but knowing that he’s _there_ , the matter of a few miles distance between them when there have been thousands for so long, makes it so much harder to imagine doing this alone. 

She’s distracted from her thoughts briefly by the Sheikh, warning her off in a way that markedly spurs her on, and then she watches him go, resolve settling, and turns to head to her own room. 

She’s going to see Jack. 

She can do it alone. She will do it alone, of course she will, if necessary – but dammit if she doesn’t long for the feeling of doing it together. 

Maybe a case is the best way to win him back over (if, that is, there’s anything left in him that wants to be won back – and there’s a tiny terrified part of her that is no longer sure of this). Maybe reminding him what they do best will remind him why he loves her.

If he still loves her. 

Phryne takes a breath, hand stilling on the doorknob as she shuts it. 

Despite everything – her heartbreak and her anger and her confusion – she cannot help but hope that he still does. 

*

"Jack?"

No answer, and she knocks again. 

"Jack, are you awake?" 

There's a long drawn out silence, then from the other side a terse, grumbled, "No."

She sighs, rolling her eyes, but ploughs on – because she won't let him shut her down, not again, not this time. Not before they’ve even had a real conversation. 

She just has to tempt him out of his sulking first.

"I need you," she whispers, and it's a lie and a truth all at the same time. "For a midnight meeting with a stranger at All Saints Church in Soho.”

“How did you find me?”

She ignores the question. “He could be deranged and dangerous." 

"That'll make two of you." 

The words are low, but still loud enough to hear, and she finds them oddly comforting. Whatever has been going through his mind since their discussion hours earlier, he has clearly calmed down somewhat or else he wouldn't be making jokes. Assuming it is a joke, of course. 

Phryne decides to assume. 

She launches into her spiel before he has time to claim otherwise, doing her best to woo him with the mystery of the case. 

Surely, if nothing else can, this will work. This _has_ to work. 

She finds herself quite unsure what she'll do if it doesn't. 

She finishes, though, and there's still no sound from him, no movement from the other side, and she lets out an exasperated puff of air, casting her eyes briefly heavenwards and swallowing down the ridiculous prick of tears she feels in them. 

"Dammit, Jack! How can you come all this way to commemorate me and then refuse to speak to me?" 

She hadn’t meant to let her calm slip, but she just can’t help it. This whole thing is ridiculous, and she doesn’t understand. 

Why would he come so far to say goodbye, but not to be with her in the first place? Why, when she is miraculously (to _some_ , at least) living again does he insist on acting like she’s still lost? 

Why, _why_ does the man have to be so damned infuriating?

There is still no sound from the other side of the door, no movement, no speech, no acknowledgement that he’s even heard her, and she takes an uneven breath against the dampness that refuses to leave her eyes. Then she shakes her head, and turns, letting out a huff that she pretends to herself is purely irritation and not hurt. 

She makes it to the second step before she hears a door open behind her. 

“Phryne?” 

The use of her given name is unfamiliar but intimate, and it’s breathed out into the noises of the boarding house with such uncertainty that she’s not even sure whether he wants her to hear it or not. From the sounds of it, he’s not either, but either way it makes her heart skip, breath catching in her throat.

She turns, and he’s standing there, one foot out of the door in just trousers and an undershirt, brow furrowed like he’s not quite sure how he came to be standing there. 

In many ways, Phryne isn’t sure either. 

How did they come to be standing here, so familiar to each other and yet so distant? How is it that they feel further apart than they’ve maybe ever been, standing just a few feet away from each other? 

“Jack,” it’s not a question, but it’s not much of an answer either. It’s just all her mouth seems to be able to form. 

He doesn’t seem to have anything further to say either – a fight happening behind his eyes that says he’s angry with his body for acting on behalf of his mind. She doesn’t like it. Doesn’t like seeing Jack looking so angry, so conflicted. She doesn’t like the way that when his eyes fall on her they’re just filled with hurt and anger, none of the warmth that, before, she had been so accustomed to. 

She had imagined their reunion so many times and in so many ways, and it was never, for a moment, anything like this. 

And Phryne decides she can’t bear that knowledge alone a moment longer. 

“This isn’t how I pictured it,” she blurts, and this, at least, seems to get his attention. 

“What?” 

“You,” she answers, and takes a step back up the stairs, back towards him. “Being here, coming after me. None of this is… it’s all wrong, Jack.” 

Finally, his expression softens. To confusion – but she’ll take it. 

“You… you pictured it?” 

At this she can’t help but chuckle, though there’s little mirth in it. She ascends the final step and gives a small shrug as she moves closer, eyes fixed on him. “Didn’t you?” 

Jack swallows, averting his gaze for a moment, and when it returns to her the pain is back. “I did… of course I did.” 

“But you didn’t come?” she asks, unable to hold it in any longer, unable to bite down on her own pain at his rejection, unable to bear not knowing any longer. “Why didn’t you _come_ , Jack?” And if these words come out lost, if they’re a little teary in their desperation, she’ll staunchly deny it later. 

Jack, though, seems more than a little alarmed at it, and finally takes another step towards her. When he speaks, it’s oddly defensive. “How can you ask me that?” 

“How can I… Jack!” she exclaims, feeling her anger returning. “I _asked_ you to come! I asked and you said you would and then… and then you just…”

“Disappeared?” he asks, and there’s anger in his own voice. “Went silent? Fell off the face of the earth?” 

Phryne grinds her jaw. “That wasn’t wholly _intentional_ , Jack, I just got a little preoccupied.” 

“Mm,” he shrugs with a nonchalance decidedly absent from his voice, hands moving to his pockets. “Getting married, so I’ve heard – although not from you, interestingly.” 

She takes a breath, steadies herself. The business with the Maharaja had been just that, business, and she’s not about to apologise for saving a man’s life.

“Why don’t we talk about that?” he asks, eyes burning, and she feels her frustration growing. 

“There’s nothing to talk about, Jack. He needed my help, I obliged.”

Jack blinks at her in apparent bewilderment. “You _married_ him.”

“So?”

“S....” Jack can’t even form the word, choking it out with a little shake of his head, and when he looks up again his eyes are full of ire. “How on earth did you think I was going to react to that? Hmm? How was I meant to take the news that you’d married another man when you’ve spent all this time telling me you’re not the marrying kind?”

“I’m not,” she insists, hurt by his fury. Has she not made that abundantly clear to him? Not laid out her lines and boundaries for him so that he can make his choices accordingly? Has she not been honest enough with him about herself that this ruse didn’t seem obviously that?

“And I accepted that,” he snaps.

She stalks closer again. “Then why can’t you accept I had other reasons for marrying the Maharaja of Alwar?” 

Jack looks fit to explode, taking another step forward, into her space. “What kind of blind faith is that?”

The words strike her unexpectedly hard, slapping some of the breath from her. She has trusted Jack, implicitly, for longer than she can measure. She’s trusted him with her life and her secrets and even, when she’d left, with her heart. She had trusted him with a heart she had sworn never to trust anyone with again, and he had all but broken it… and now, finally, she thinks she might be seeing why.

Jack doesn’t trust her. Not the way she trusts him, it seems, not the way she’d thought they trusted each other. 

Phryne looks up at him with a small shake of her head, and when her voice comes it’s quieter, pained. 

“The kind I thought we had.”

This, at least, seems to move him – and he frowns, confusion creeping back in through the cracks in his anger that her words seem to have caused. 

“I thought you trusted me, Jack,” she adds, a whisper, all the hurt she’s been suppressing, been expressing in anger, spilling out into the words. “I thought you knew who I was, who I _am_. I thought you...”

“Thought I what?” he asks, expression unreadable. 

She shakes her head again, blinking against the returning warmth of tears. Today has been one constant barrage of emotions; hers, her friends’, Jack’s. Her brain is still trying to catch up to half the things that have happened since her plane touched down and she suddenly finds she just doesn’t want any of it, anymore. 

She doesn’t want this strange reality where Jack looks at her with so much anger, where there is a fascinating, mysterious case sitting waiting for their attention but even that isn’t enough to tempt him into being near her. 

She doesn’t, she realises with a crushing sense of impending loss, want a reality where Jack doesn’t love her. 

She cannot change who she is though, will not change it, not even for him. 

“You can’t stop me doing what I need to do,” she murmurs, employing everything she can to keep the words steady. This, she realises, is it. She’d thought it had been standing on an airfield, tossing down the gauntlet and hoping that he’d pick it up. Then she’d thought it had been in a silence that she’d been trying her best to ignore. It’s here though, in the dim light of a boarding house, so very far from home. 

This is how their ending is decided. 

“The Maharaja needed my help, just as Shirin does now.”

She’s telling him what she’d been so sure he already knew, what she’d assumed he had already come to accept about her, and it pains her even having to have the conversation. They had felt so close, so in tune with each other’s motivations, and his surprise feels like betrayal. Certainly, when she’d invited him along to start with, when she’d extended the offer to come and do what she needed to do _with_ her. 

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think one lifetime is going to be enough for you to save the whole world.” And it’s such a non-answer that it enrages her – even more when he turns, heading back for the door of his room – but it springs in tandem with that same desperation she’d felt on the lawn at the sight of him retreating and she can’t help but call out after him. 

“Well I’m sorry too, if that’s the case.” And at his complete lack of response to this she finally cracks, temper flaring beyond reason. 

If Jack really wants to act like this, to wallow in self-pity and act like her return means nothing to him, then he can, but she’s not going to just let him do so guilt free. She’s not going to let him run away and bury her without a final word. 

If anyone is getting a final word, it’s her.

“And I’m _very_ sorry that I’m not _dead_!”

He freezes, and she narrows her eyes at his back.

She’s no idea, honestly, how he’ll react to this, and she finds her heart leaping to her throat the minute the words are out. This could backfire, monumentally, this could really be the moment he shuts a door in her face and never reopens it – but at least this time he cannot hide behind distance when he does so.

If he’s giving up, truly, then this time he’s going to have to do it to her face.

The seconds drag out, interminable, and Phryne waits.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time I try to resolve a big argument in one conversation just... don't let me. I've rewritten this so many times I've lost count. I hope it proves satisfying but good God. _Never again._ Endless love to LeChatNoir1918, who has sat by patiently and listened to me scream. 
> 
> Still sort of considering a follow up. Sort of considering throwing myself in a river instead.

Finally, Jack turns, and Phryne keeps her eyes fixed on his face, searching for some sign of how he plans to react. He’s stoic, though, completely, and she cannot even begin to decipher what’s happening behind those dark eyes. 

He steps back towards her, right up into her space in a way that makes something flutter in her stomach that she curses straight back down again. 

His eyes are fire though, and she braces herself for whatever further hurt his words might bring. Then he speaks, “You think I’d wish you dead?” 

And the way his voice breaks on the words stops her short, all her anger falling away again. Jack sounds as heartbroken as she feels, his words pained. 

“Don’t you?” she asks, aiming for breezy but landing instead on raw honesty that it appears she’s quite unable to mask. “Because I’m rather getting the impression that would make this easier for you.” 

Something in Jack’s eyes shatters, and she watches in shock as tears well there, one hand half reaching for her and then dropping away again. 

“Phryne…” the word comes out sounding nothing short of broken, choked in grief that she’s not yet been fully privy to, hidden as it’s been behind his own anger – and it guts her. 

She has been so focused, all this time, on her own heartbreak, her own pains, that she hadn’t really stopped to dwell on his side of the story. It’s sitting there, though, clear in his eyes. Six weeks of grief and mourning, spilling out in tears as he stares her down. 

“Do you really believe I’d ever wish that?” he asks her, and the words are ragged enough that they make her heart twist tightly in her chest. 

She finds herself quite suddenly on the back foot, wanting nothing more than for that pain to leave Jack’s face. 

“No,” she whispers, insistent, staring up at him. “No, I just… Jack,” and she takes a breath, searching for the right words. None are forthcoming, however, and she simply shrugs. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

He laughs, humourless and soft. “That makes two of us.”

“I never meant you to think I was dead,” she offers with a sigh, an olive-branch. She will not shoulder his anger for it, but this, she can give him. She can give him the assurance that she would never seek to deliberately hurt him like that.

There’s a long moment where he just watches her, and then he lets out a tired breath. “I know.”

They stand in silence, facing each other down, tear-stained and tremulous.

“I really thought you knew who I was,” she breathes eventually, whispering her thoughts aloud, and the words echo the brokenness she sees in his eyes. It all feels like some cruel joke, that this is how they reunited when she had left him with a heart so full of love and hope. She wishes she could go back to that moment, to the pure joy of feeling that Jack was hers, and that he wanted her just as she was.

“I do,” he breathes back, the words earnest, and yet she finds she can’t believe them. 

“Then why don’t you _trust_ me?” she asks him again, desperate. Jack has always claimed to not want to change her, has always insisted he understands who she is but here, in the proof of it, it feels like an empty promise. 

“I did,” he murmurs in response. “I trusted you through all of it. Through the news reports and the gossip and the goddamn commiserating looks and people treating me like a scorned man. I ignored it all, Phryne, _because_ I trusted you.”

She stares back at him, speechless at the implication in his words, waiting for a punchline that she fears she can now guess.

“And then I waited,” he continues, and she closes her eyes. “I waited and then, finally, I hear from you and… nothing. Not even a passing mention.”

It settles in her stomach like a rock sinking through water, the full weight of their misunderstanding, burying the remains of her anger and leaving her feeling hollowed out and hopeless. 

No wonder he hadn’t come – he’d already known. All this time she’d assumed he’d just been sulking – but it’s more than that, more than just offence at silence. Jack had thought she’d truly abandoned him, her silence, and silent denial, a contradiction to what he’d thought he’d known, what he’d wanted to believe.

“Jack,” she breathes, and cannot help but reach for him, her fingers settling on his arm. The fact that he doesn’t pull away is the first spark of true hope she has felt since he’d walked away from her that morning. “I _was_ going to tell you about it, eventually, but I was just waiting to do it in person. I… I had no idea the Australian press had hold of the news.”

“All it needed was a telegram, Phryne,” Jack shoots back, clearly frustrated, though he still doesn’t move from her touch. 

“I couldn’t send a telegram in case the message was intercepted – I couldn’t really message at all whilst I was pretending to be happy, newly wedded Indian royalty – his enemies have spies everywhere.” 

Jack lets out an irritated breath, shaking his head. “And that mattered why, exactly? _Weren’t_ you happy, newly wedded Indian royalty?”

“Jack!” Phryne exclaims at this, her fingers falling away from his arm with the shock of the accusation. How could he say something like that? How could he really not _know_? “How could you really think there was anything genuine about it?”

“Because I didn’t know _what_ to think!” he shoots back, finally stepping away from her again. “I never know what to think when all I get is half the damn story!”

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

“It means,” he groans, “that you never tell me anything! Maybe if you explained what you were doing every once in a while I could help – or at least _understand_ – but you keep me in the dark at any given opportunity. You ask me to trust you, Phryne, but you never grant me any in return!”

Phryne blinks at him. Does he really think that? That she doesn’t trust him? That she willingly withholds things to hurt him?

“I do trust you, Jack,” she breathes with a small shake of her head. “I trust you more than anyone, but that doesn’t mean I should have to explain myself to you all of the time. It doesn’t mean I _will_ explain myself to you all of the time.”

“And I’m not asking you to explain yourself all of the time, Phryne! I don’t need to know your reasonings for every little thing you do, I’d never ask you that, but this? Big things? Marriage, and Maharajas and things that really matter? I don’t think it’s too much to ask that you respect me enough to keep me more or less informed. Is it? I mean how would you have reacted if you’d heard news that I married someone, but I neglected to mention it to you myself in correspondence? Are you really telling me that wouldn’t bother you?”

Phryne opens her mouth and closes it several times, contemplating the question. How would she feel? Upset, angry, betrayed? All of the above, she supposes, but she’s also sure she’d assume there was some sort of reason for it. She’d give him the benefit of the doubt. Wouldn’t she?

Would she?

She’d hardly given him the benefit of the doubt for his rejection, after all. With no other information she had taken his silence for sulking, assumed he’d gone back on his promises and returned to his idea that she was too much trouble. 

She hadn’t stopped to consider that there might be more to it than that, distracted as she’d been by her own aching heart. She hadn’t even stopped to consider he might have found out about her marriage before she’d planned… but then it also wasn’t like he’d bothered to ask the question himself, either. 

Perhaps, she realises – and cannot help but be ruefully amused by it – their problem isn’t trust, after all. Perhaps it’s that they just don’t seem to be able to bloody _communicate_. 

Perhaps, though, she thinks with a sudden surge of hope, that’s something they can still fix.

She’s not going to apologise – she’d saved a man’s life – and she shouldn’t have to, but Jack isn’t looking for an apology, she realises. He’s just asking to be on her side of the secret with her. He’s asking to be her partner, not her sidekick, and though she can’t – she _won’t_ – promise that she’ll always explain things to him before she does them, this, she might just be able to grant him. 

“It was strictly business, Jack,” she tells him, voice soft, and Jack blinks in surprise as he seems to understand what she’s doing. “The Maharaja is… well his true love is the Prince of Patna, and if that had been discovered then the man would have been stoned to death.”

Jack’s mouth falls half-open. “You saved his life?” 

“Yes,” is her simple reply, and her fingers return to his arm, tentative and questioning. 

“You married a man to save his life?” Jack repeats, still seemingly caught on this detail, and she rolls her eyes at his confusion.

“It’s the only reason I can ever think of that I would.” 

“Romantic, as always.” 

She huffs. “ _Jack_. You _know_ who I am.” 

He swallows, nods, and when he looks back at her there’s a warmth blooming behind his eyes that almost takes her breath away in relief at its familiarity. “Yes,” he murmurs. “I think I do.”

“I didn’t intend to hurt you, Jack. I would never intend that, but I – ”

“Will always help someone in need, regardless?” he finishes for her, and her heart jumps back to her throat again in anticipation of what else he might have to say on the matter. 

“Yes.”

He looks at her, assessing, something working itself out behind his eyes. Then he nods again, as if firming himself on whatever has just happened in his mind, and she finds her fingers inadvertently digging into his arm as she waits. 

“Alright.”

She licks her lips, mouth feeling suddenly dry, heartbeat quickening. “Alright?”

Jack lets out a long sigh, then speaks again, “I’ll never demand explanations from you, Phryne, but I wouldn’t mind being offered them on occasion, even if you are busy trying to save the world.”

Phryne moves closer, fingers sliding up to his shoulder, across to his chest. “You could always just come and save the world with me, negate the need for explanation entirely?” She attempts to make the words seductive, but the shadow of his rejection hangs over them, and they come out more open in their imploration than she’d intended. 

Jack seems to pick up on this, and his own hand lands on her waist, his fingers spreading to hold her, pull her closer, his thumb stroking almost absently at the base of her ribs. The feel of him, his touch and his warmth, the closeness of him after so much distance, so much anger, is almost more than she can process. 

She casts a glance down to where he holds her, checking that the sensation is real and not some construct of her tired brain. When she looks up again, Jack’s expression takes her breath away. 

His eyes are dark, swimming in all the same emotion she herself feels. Hurt, grief, _hope_. He looks at her like he had on the lawn – before they had argued, before they had cut each other in defence of their own fragile hearts – he looks at her like she is the only damn thing in the world that matters, and Phryne feels warmth swimming at her eyes again in sheer relief at it. 

“I know you’re afraid,” he murmurs, and Phryne frowns. 

“Afraid?” she asks in response, her own words no more than a whisper. “What am I afraid of?”

“Me,” Jack breathes. “You’re afraid that if you fall in love with me, I’ll turn you into a policeman’s wife and try to stop you saving the world.”

She almost laughs at the statement. Only Jack could be so very oblivious as to think, still, that she isn’t already so very in love with him that the use of fearing it hasn’t long since passed into futility.

There is something she is fearful of, granted, something she has not allowed herself to dwell on – before, when she’d been anticipating the future discussion – or today, in her distraction with whether his distance rendered the point moot regardless. Jack is a traditional man, a man who values the rules of marriage despite his own failed one. 

And she is no longer a single woman, not in the eyes of the law. 

They have come so far, talked themselves apart and together again in no time really at all, and she cannot bear the thought that now, standing in his arms again so close to settlement, their differing morals on marriage might send them flying into orbit again. 

“Well,” she murmurs, stealing herself for whatever might come. This is where their ending is decided, and she will take it whatever it is. “It can’t happen. I’m already a married woman.”

Phryne holds her breath, watches Jack swallow, braces herself for the fall.

“And I don’t need to marry you.”

Her heart skips, relief overwhelming her. 

“I just need your heart,” he continues, the words so raw and open that she feels herself melt at them. “Because, God knows, you’ve got mine.”

Phryne stares up at him, fingers curling into his chest. It is a confession so very long coming that she almost cannot believe that it’s real. Certainly not now, here, when she had marched to his door with her heart half-broken, in the echoes of their anger and their pain. Even more so in the context of him admitting, aloud, his willingness to move on his carefully held ideals about marriage.

It is real, though, she sees it in his eyes. They are earnest and hopeful, full of warmth and love that she has always been so accustomed to seeing there. They are eyes she knows, eyes she has been lost in so many times, eyes that she has missed so desperately. _Jack’s eyes_. 

And she trusts them without question. 

“Jack,” she murmurs, overwhelmed by him, by her own emotions, by both of their damned stupidity that it is only now, after things had become so seemingly hopeless, that they are finally speaking their truth. “I gave you that a long time ago.” And as the words escape her she notes, almost surprised, that despite how very long she has spent wrestling with them, they are now so far from difficult to say. If anything, they’re a relief, a giant weight lifting from her chest – so much greater than an invitation to follow her or a telegram with a few flirtatious lines of Shakespeare – no matter how big of a step they might have felt at the time. 

They feel such a relief, in fact, that when her next words come they are from the defence method they could be taken for. The teasing is genuine, fond.

“For a detective, you don’t notice much.” 

Jack laughs, a soft, disbelieving chuckle. 

“You’re impossible.”

“Yes,” she agrees, pressing her body closer to him. Jack’s fingers reach out for her cheek, cradling it with reverence.

“You’re alive,” he whispers, and it’s awed and adoring and she notes with surprise that tears have gathered in his eyes again – though he seems determined not to let them fall this time. 

“Yes,” she breathes again in response, reassuring. 

“I’m so sorry I didn’t come, Phryne,” he tells her, and his voice cracks on the words. “I’m sorry I didn’t explain, that I just – ”

She shushes him, a finger rising to his lips as she watches guilt swirl into his expression. “I’m sorry you thought I’d died, that you had to go through that again. I’m sorry you spent all that time mourning me, Jack.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” he admits with a sigh as she moves her hand around to his cheek, a mirror of his own hold. “You didn’t know. I shouldn’t have taken that out on you.”

“No,” she agrees, thumb stroking against the soft hint of stubble on his jaw, “but I understand why you did.”

“I’m not sorry I got married,” she adds then, with a gentle smirk, eliciting an eye roll from him. “I need to be clear on that - but I am sorry that my handling of it caused you pain.” 

His fingers caress her cheek and she can’t help but lean into them, eyes falling closed, his touch a strange kind of magic after all the stress and heartache of the last twelve hours. 

“We both handled things terribly,” he murmurs. “I fear we’ve made a bit of a habit out of it.”

Phryne chuckles at that, opening her eyes again. He’s not wrong – their entire history involves them making a mess of things. It’s almost funny, except in the ways it has hurt them so much with it. 

“The course of true love ne’er did run smooth,” she quotes at him, the words dry, and relishes the way his eyes light in amusement at it, the way his lips tug up at the corners into the first real smile she’s seen from him since she left him standing watching her fly away. 

“So quick bright things come to confusion.”

She scoffs. “You could say that again, Jack.”

“Mm,” he hums in agreement. “Though I prefer the next line.”

Phryne raises an eyebrow, expectant, hand dropping to imitate her other against his chest. 

“If then true lovers have been ever crossed,” he whispers, “it stands as an edict in destiny.”

“That’s a little pessimistic, wouldn’t you say?” she teases, then gasps as Jack uses the hand at her cheek to pull her closer, their lips barely a breath apart. 

“On the contrary,” Jack replies. “Hermia goes on to say that since the trouble is unavoidable, one should resolve to just be patient.”

“I think we’ve both been patient quite long enough, Jack,” Phryne breathes, eyes flicking down to his lips and back again. He’s so close she can almost feel him, and the anticipation is fast approaching unbearable. 

“Now there I’d agree,” he murmurs, and then his lips are on hers. She meets him halfway, with what little distance there is left to meet in, and cannot help but sigh at the feel of him. The warm press of his mouth against hers floods her with all the comfort she had long been missing, and her hands move to twist into his shirt, pulling him into her. The hand he’d had at her cheek slides under her arm and around her back in response, tugging to eliminate any last distance between them. 

They part, just for a moment, a steadying second where she finds her eyes fluttering up to check he is still there and this moment is truly real, and then they meet again, their second kiss open-mouthed and needy. She flicks her tongue out, testing, and he opens his mouth further, his own tongue meeting hers, a gentle pressure that soon turns to a dance, curious, exploring, hungry. 

When they finally part again for breath Jack’s hands keep her close, their noses brushing, foreheads tipped together. 

“Jack?” she asks, the words breathy. “If I asked again. If we were back on that airfield and I asked you to come after me again, would you?”

She’s relatively sure, given the position of his hands and the fresh taste of him on her tongue, but she still finds herself holding her breath for his answer. 

“Would you still want me to?” he asks, and she’d be annoyed at the evasion if she weren’t so distracted by the way his thumb has resumed its soft stroking of her ribcage, the movement sending little shivers up her spine. She looks up at him, though, meets his eyes so that he knows, when she says it, how very much she means it. 

“More than anything.”

His mouth is back on hers before she can even catch up to the movement, his kiss hungrier now, heavy with intent. 

“Then yes,” he replies into the kiss, giving a gentle nip to her lower lip and sliding a hand up into her hair. “I’d come after you, wherever you wanted me to go.” 

Phryne cannot help but grin at this, her chest bursting with the joy of his response. A gauntlet she had thrown down so very long ago, finally, finally picked up. 

She’s just melting back into the warmth of his kiss – surrendering herself to the euphoria of him, Jack, his love and his touch and his _mouth_ , moving with passion and skill against hers – when she remembers. 

The church. 

The meeting. 

The bloody case. 

She had left with plenty of time to try and win Jack around but it has taken all that and then some and she is definitely going to be late if she doesn't –

“Oh _hell_ ,” she exclaims, tearing herself away from the kiss, hands travelling to Jack’s arms where they have fallen to her waist in surprise. 

“What is it?” he asks, face full of concern. 

Phryne lets out an irritated sigh, and raises a hand back to his chest, turning her expression flirtatious.

This really would be far more fun if he were there. 

“Well,” she starts, tracing a finger across to his top button and meeting his eyes. “If I asked you to come after me… right now… to a meeting with a stranger at All Saints Church in Soho, would you?”

Comprehension dawns, and Jack’s eyes sparkle with the intrigue she had hoped all along she might be able to put in them. 

“I might be persuadable,” he replies, hand coming up to hold hers where it lies on his chest. “With good enough reason.”

Phryne smirks, leaning back into him again, and staring up through her eyelashes in precisely the way she knows will make him melt. 

“He could be deranged and dangerous.”

Jack leans in himself, and she half thinks he’s going to kiss her again – which, really, might be a terrible idea if she’s actually going to make this meeting – but he moves further, lips coming to her ear, the warmth of his breath a gentle caress.

“That’ll make two of you.”

This time, standing with the steady weight of his hands on her waist, the joy of his confession fresh in her heart, Phryne knows the words are joking. And with them, she finally feels like she has landed.


End file.
